!!

Many years ago (about 25 if memory serves) I was part owner of a radio station. The chief engineer and I created our own traffic/billing/accounting software on an 8088 system running Informix on a Xenix operating system. I did the system design, he wrote the code in C.

It was brilliant, compact, efficient, and so intuitively obvious in operation that the engineer and I were pleased that we had written in a few months time a better system for running a radio station than anything sold commercially... and the systems out there sold for about $100K.

Then we handed it over to the sales manager who was also the general manager, and his wife who did the accounting. It was completely incomprehensible to them. Things that were obvious to a pair of geek programmer nerds were completely at odds with how they wanted to do things, and since the software was written for them to use, not for us, well... you get the point.

To sum it up in a few words: your priorities as a programmer will not be the same as the end user's.

tanstaafl.